Driving in Georgia, part 2: I say sidewalk, you say traffic lane.

In Kartouli, the Georgian language, there is only one word for “finger” and “toe.”  Georgians, therefore, say “toes are fingers for the foot.”  But there is a word for “sidewalk” and another, different word for “parking lot” and yet a completely different word for “traffic lane.”  This makes me wonder, as I walk the streets of this fair city, “Why, then, are these people parking, or even worse, driving, where I’m walking?”

            Georgia has seen an explosion of vehicles.  Just in Tbilisi alone, the number of vehicles on the streets, both registered and unregistered vehicles, has doubled in the past five years according to Georgia Today newspaper.  The number of available parking spaces, however, has decreased by almost a third.  Simply put, the city planners failed to anticipate the problems of automobile transportation.  Everyone was expected to take the plentiful public transportation, so it was deemed unnecessary to take into account the needs of average pedestrians.  Thus, Georgian drivers have taken to parking wherever there’s a space large enough to fit their car, and this usually means parking on what some pedestrians might naively mistake for a sidewalk.  Here, it’s taken as a minor nuisance and generally ignored.  In America, their behavior would cause multitudes of not necessarily sympathetic pedestrians to go bug-eyed apoplectic. 

            Let me give you an example.  I live on Abashidze Street which runs parallel and two blocks up from Chavchavadze Avenue, one of the main streets in the city.  I enjoy walking along Chavchavadze; it has stores, restaurants, clubs and bars, schools and shops, and a large number of apartment buildings.  Picture Market Street in Philadelphia, if you want.  Chavchavadze Avenue is, on the maps, a six-lane avenue; however, the many cars parked, long term, in the outside lanes, clog the avenue to, usually only four, but often just two, barely passable lanes. 

 

             So what’s a driver to do?  The answer, unfortunately, has been to drive up on the sidewalks, blowing their horns at pedestrians to clear the way.  (To the best of my limited knowledge, there are no words in Kartouli to describe people like that.  There are many choice ones in English, however all are unprintable in a family blog such as this one.)

            But as big a problem as it is to simply walk the streets, crossing them is much, much worse.  In the US, drivers generally understand that they should not accelerate into humans attempting to cross the street on foot.  Here, not so much.  I’ve seen grannies leaping out of the way of SUVs which are, more often than not, driving at highway cruising speeds down the sidewalk.  On the main streets of Tbilisi, there are no red lights to allow pedestrians to cross.  Not that it would matter if there were.  Drivers do not give way in Tbilisi.  Not in the pedestrian crosswalks, not in the city squares, and especially not on the sidewalks.  Add to that the fact that by Georgian law, pedestrians do not enjoy the right of way ANYWHERE, not even in the crosswalks.  Further add to that an excessively macho approach to driving and you get a situation described on the Lonely Planet website this way:  “Pedestrians are at risk as drivers assume they’ll get out of the way of moving cars – bad luck if your sight or hearing isn’t too good.”  Lonely Planet goes on to describe motorists who “would rather ‘mow you down’ than lose face by giving way.”  Now to be fair, drivers say they have no choice but to keep moving.  “If you stop suddenly to let a pedestrian pass, someone will hit you in the rear going very fast.” 

            So how do you cross the street?  There is the “take a deep breath and lurch forward” approach; there’s the “Usain Bolt” approach as you sprint as fast as you can before the driver has a chance to time your speed and lead you appropriately; and there’s the “dodge or die” approach where you play Frogger with traffic, dodging cars to progress across the street one lane at a time, often finding yourself marooned between cars cutting in front of and behind you as you hop from one foot to the other waiting for the smallest gap to appear between cars so you can sprint to the next lane.  Or you can take the underground passageways.

            The underground passageways are darkly ominous, often unlit, bodily-fluid filled, malodorous, graffiti-marked tunnels under the streets.  While some of the tunnels have been commercialized, like the two below, many are stinky, ammonia-smelling, dark tunnels used by the homeless or weak-bladdered as dormitories and/or bathrooms.  By the way, see that liquid on the steps?  It hadn’t rained in over a week the day I took this picture, so use your imagination to figure out what all that fluid is.  Think about it, but don’t tell me.  I don’t want to know.

            Ah, you say, that’s just city driving.  Certainly, it’s calmer on the highways outside the city.  Less targets, I mean pedestrians, after all, and fewer cars.  Ask my wife about that.  We drove to the northern part of the country on a beautiful, sunny day this past summer.  I think she aged about 20 years in that one afternoon.  It seems she found the ride a bit hair-raising at first, what with the reckless and incessant passing, and the total disregard for lane markers (when there actually were lane markers which was pretty rare).  I explained to her that Georgian drivers do not ignore the white lines at all.  In fact, they use them for alignment:  two tires on the left side of the line and two on the right.  As oncoming traffic is doing the same thing, driving can resemble a perpetual game of “chicken.”  And if you need to pass, no problem – by all means do so, whether on the right or left.  If you are going around a curve, so what?  It’s the other guy’s responsibility to avoid you.  He’ll move over.  Or not.

 

 

            She also didn’t understand the unwritten rule of Georgian driving, something buried deep within the psyche of every Georgian male:  that the vehicle in front of you must be passed at all costs.  And the longer you delay passing him, the lower your testosterone level drops, and the greater chance your wife or girlfriend will run off with that fellow in the BMW driving 60 mph on the unfinished shoulder.

            Debbie also was unaccustomed to another staple of Georgian driving, namely cows (and the occasional pig or goat or sheep) on the road.  Cattle roam free in Georgia, even in Tbilisi, and they particularly enjoy being on the roads with the cooling wind generated by whizzing cars.  The cows pay not a bit of attention to drivers.  A bus can miss a lazing cow by inches and she won’t twitch an ear.

            I figure that Georgian drivers must be the best in the world as they maneuver around pedestrians, parked cars, cows, pigs, blind curves, and potholes the size of small apartments, all with effortless aplomb and all while looking directly you as they talk.  But the best thing about Georgian driving is this:  if you stay with it long enough, you’re eventually going to end up at a place like this: 

 

 

            Thanks for reading.